Zbrush Dinosaurs and 3D Prints

[SpartanSquat]

Good point Wings, I made an adjustment on that area after you pointed it out.  Looks much better now!

So here are the poses so far - I'm thinking of maybe doing one more, so if anyone has any suggestions, or if they'd like to see one of these replaced, feel free to chime in.  Otherwise I've started to figure out what needs to be done for these guys for printing purposes - for the 1/72 scale Amargasaurus is most likely going to be printed in FD and FUD ONLY.  This is just because of the delicate nature of the spines and tail, if I blow them up to a size that would fit within WSF's parameters it would probably look too goofy.  I'd rather have something that looks a bit better proportion wise and trade off having to print it off in another material.

This brings me to my next question - Some people here have expressed an interest in a larger size - I'd like to get an idea of what sort of acceptable larger scale would be welcomed for this sauropod.  As it stands, it's 10 inches for the 1/40 scale, 5.5 for the 1/72. Would love to hear some ideas on what everyone would want.

This is incredible models my zbrush mate! Could ask you something? The neck spines are another 3D piece or its from the mesh?

[Gorgonzola]

The neck spines and the back spines are separate meshes.  Neck spines I made up in blender before importing them as OBJs in Zbrush as subtools, while the back spines were done by making a single low poly mesh of the spine then creating an IMM brush out of in Zbrush, allowing me to draw a curve with repeating spine elements on it.  Makes doing that stuff crazy easy now.

[Gorgonzola]

So these are the final poses I thought of - I'm thinking of cutting one of the walking ones because two of them look a bit similar, just mirrored.  I feel like there's another I could replace it with that would be a nice dynamic pose to go along with the group, but I'm honestly drawing blanks on it.  Anyone have a suggestion?  I think I might scour a few sauropod paintings to get some ideas.  Ideally though I'm going to keep it limited to about 5-6 poses, just to make the whole prep process easier on me.

[Nebuloid]

It looks amazing ! The first two poses look best to me, natural and on its hind legs...  Hoping you can get it into production !

[captain jack]

Wow!! Nice, really dynamic poses.Will be interesting to see these printed.5-6 on a base.Way Cool.Awesome! Thanks for sharing your craft.

[Bokisaurus]

Amazing herd! WOw! 1 and 3 looks similarly posed, so if you are to take one out, one of those will do. Love the others, really amazing!

[Blade-of-the-Moon]

I like 1,2, and 4 .  You should do a rolling in the mud one, one laying down maybe ?

[amargasaurus cazaui]

A nice look at the Cryolophosaurus done by Gorgonzola at 1/72 scale.. I did the test prints for these two.......but Martin Garrat provided the paint and base. I think the piece came out stunning...love the color choices.

[Seijun]

I love the amarga except for the lipless-ness, which terrifies me, lol

[krentz]

  Nice Poses! 

  How are you getting such nice curvature on the tails?  Dig you build some kind of rig?

D

[Gorgonzola]

Amargasaurus: Stunning is right, I can't believe he got such great results out of such tiny figures!  Excellent work as always.

Seijun: Haha, I know what you mean, every once in awhile from a certain angle the Amargasaurus head starts to look like a Wayne Barlowe creature because of the no lips thing.  From what I understand though it seems like sauropods like diplodocoids and dicreaosaurids were lipless and just had massive rakes at the end of their mouths.  There was a decent argument for it over at the SV-POW blog for a lipless apatosaurus, so since both apatosaurus and amargsaurus are under the diplodocidae family I figured our spiny necked friend here might be similar.  But yeah, it is a bit freaky.  It's like the sort of rictus grin a Joker fish would have from Batman.

Krentz: Wow, thank you so much!  I'm a big fan of your work, Krentz.  I actually just finished taking your Zbrush workshop for dinosaur sculpting, great stuff.

I wish I had a rig on it, but I can't get them to work right at all in Zbrush (I end up with really weird distortions in the feet typically), and I am ignorant enough of digital modeling that I have no idea how to construct a rig in anything else.  So all I've been doing is using transpose master and masking out what I want to pose, then rotate, mask, rotate, mask, rotate, mask on a new layer until I get what I want. It's not nearly as tedious as I thought at first, I can get a pose done in about 20-30 minutes if I know what I'm after.

It works pretty much for everything I need, especially if I remesh it with better topology first, which I did after I laid out the basic muscle formations and before I got down into the fun detailing stuff.  The only big issue I run into with this method is I can't get therapod legs to cooperate with me AT ALL. It works okay for the most part but if I want to do something really neat with it, like get them into a crouching pose or something like your laying down pose you did for your Spinosaurus, then things get borked really fast.  Just distortion everywhere on it, especially because I'm trying to keep the hips from wiggling about every which way.  I posted some photos to describe it better (and this is why, for everyone else, why I haven't been able to put out a prone pose I'm pleased with yet).  Not sure what a better method would be to solve this issue.




UPDATE!  I have uploaded all the 1/40 Amargasaurus models to Shapeways after checking dimensions and all that, and I ordered a test print of one to see how it looks yesterday.  I'll put out feelers for any volunteers in a little while, but I'd like to get the 1/72 scale up first.  I can't give a firm deadline on when that'll happen because I may have to make a few adjustments to them overall, but I'll let everyone know as soon as I have them up and am looking for people to order a test print or two for both scales.

I'm not sure yet, but I think one of the differences I can already kinda guess will happen will be super thick spines on the neck (just to meet print minimums), and possibly losing the back spines if they're too small.  But that'll be something that could be figured out in the test printing stage.

[krentz]

The front of the thigh is referred to as "the triangle of death".  Even with a good animation rig that area always overlaps, distorts, collapses... and it seems to always be in a triangular region from the front of the illiim, down the front of the thigh and then up to a place just in front of the illiim ( ok, why does spell correct mess with that word...I give up).  Watch the original Walking With Dinosaurs and wince.  Most of the creatures have that problem.  The best bet is when you create your mask- in lower res- don't go too high up on the thigh and carry the mask into the rib cage and onto the cfm muscle at the base of the tail.  Then, feather the hell out of it and rotate.  You will need to use the move tool to correct things.  If you smooth things out in low res you will not affect the high frequency details when you up res, so that helps a lot.

  I don't do the Zsphere rigs either, but I might try one for tails.  They just get distorted so quickly.  I did the base of the Sideshow rex as a 3D print out and sculpted over top of it with clay.  I remeasured the print out to see if the tail was too long, because it looked like it, and sure enough bending it into that pose did lengthen it.  I had to shave off half an inch of the tail.  It was really hard because I hardened the starch print out with cyano glue to make it really strong.  Sanding that was probably really unhealthy.

  Anyway, keep up the good work, I always look forward to seeing it!

DK

[Gorgonzola]

Ooof, I was afraid of that.  I kinda figured that that area was just not going to be kind in a 3D model without some real heavy tweaking.  What I would give for Zbrush to develop a blendshape sort of feature for something like that - doing the whole alt+rotate thing kiiiiinda does it, but it also presents some of its own problems depending on what it is.  Might take a crack on the T. rex again model to see what can be done about it, since it would be nice to be able to do some prone poses. But yeah, it's almost like the normal topology flow you'd figure just doesn't work for dinosaur legs.  I wonder if there's a better methodology to try and combat that problem rather than grimacing through it...

So, regarding the tail thing - I tried out a few methods before just settling on that.  One was the zsphere rigs, but it was time consuming because in the end I had to set up nearly the rest of the model as well otherwise the rest of the sculpt would become distorted (found this out when I did my Parasaurolophus models...tweaked something in the tail, found my crest offset quite a bit...grr...).  The other method was one I think I've seen you do in a workshop, where you lay out the move transpose tool along the tail, then do the alt+move in the middle to bend it.  Only problem I realized with that one afterwards was since you're not moving the end point of the tail, it lengthens out the tail because you're pulling the geometry away from the end points, like pulling at an elastic band that's stapled between two points.

In the end I settled on the whole mask and rotate method since it seemed to prevent that for the most part - You have to move along the length of the tail and mask more and more of it as you move to the end, but it should keep the length of it to whatever you determined initially.  I'd need to do a measurement comparison between a neutral and posed model to be sure, but it makes sense from a logic standpoint.  All you're doing is slowly rotating the tail along several axes, so nothing should be distorted.

And thank you very much for indulging in some shop talk with me! I can talk about this sort of stuff all day.

[tyrantqueen]

Is the Tyrannosaurus rex going to be a Shapeways print? I recall you mentioning that you were planning something special with it, or words to that effect. It seems a bit of shame to waste such a detailed, amazing model on Shapeways. I like Shapeways and all, but I don't think that the technology is advanced enough to provide high detailed stuff without charging an arm and leg for it. Maybe you could turn it into a kit, like David Krentz did with his.

I could be wrong of course....whatever happens, I'll probably end up buying it anyway

[Gorgonzola]

TyrantQueen:  Yeah, things are still moving on my T. rex...unfortunately I still can't say much of anything about it since it's mostly out of my hands at this point, but there should be something to report around November at the earliest.  I've been quite excited about it though!  I really can't wait to share more with it.  In the meantime though, I have to just chug along and let that grow on its own.

[freyreuxine13]

Nice work you got there guys. I have some models myself but still a work in progress. I'll be posting it when it's done. David Krentz and Mr. Kastner inspired me to start Digital Sculpting so most of my models kinda looks like those of Mr.David's and Kastner's crafts.

[Nebuloid]

Looking forward to the Amargasaurus, really hope I can order one in the near future !

[s.foulkes]

Can anyone tell me how to get the 1/40th cryolopho?

[tyrantqueen]

Can anyone tell me how to get the 1/40th cryolopho?

Shapeways.

[Gorgonzola]

Hi Shane! You can find my 1/40 Cryos over on my shapeways store, via this link: http://www.shapeways.com/shops/gorgonzola

I also gotta say I am extremely honored to have a sculptor like you asking about my work. I've been a big admirer of your stuff for years.  Anyway, hope that helps!